White Paper

Improving Regional Planning in the Bay Area

Many attempts have been made to foster better collaboration between the Association of Bay Area Governments and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. A proposal to establish a merged planning department has again opened up the discussion about the future of regional planning in the Bay Area. SPUR recommends studying a full merger of the two agencies.

Report

Strengthening the Bay Area's Regional Governance

The Bay Area economy has rebounded from the recession, but major regional challenges threaten our continued prosperity. SPUR makes the case that some of the biggest threats to the Bay Area’s long-term economic competitiveness are best addressed through better regional governance.

Advocacy Letter

SPUR’s Comments on Plan Bay Area

Plan Bay Area is an important step forward in comprehensive regional planning in the Bay Area. Our comments on the plan address the gap between our vision of a more concentrated region and the tools available to achieve it.

Ongoing Initiative

The Future of Work

In the last three decades, employment has spread from city centers to car-centric, low-density office parks. How can we move more jobs to places served by transit? SPUR looks at how to make this shift while strengthening innovation, job growth and the prosperity of the Bay Area.

The Urbanist

The Northern California Megaregion

Northern California, home to 14 million people, is expected to add at least 10 million people by 2050. How we plan for and accommodate that growth is the defining question for urban planning in Northern California today.

SPUR Report

Beyond the Tracks

California cities anticipating the rewards of new high-speed rail stations may fail to reap the full economic and environmental benefits without key land-use planning. SPUR identifies strategies that will contribute to the success of high-speed rail and help realize the full potential of this multi-billion-dollar system.

Find more of SPUR's regional planning research

Updates and Events

SPUR supports the broad outlines of the City of San Jose's draft Diridon Station Area Plan. We do, however, think that the Draft Program Environmental Impact Report does not provide sufficient analysis of some of the project impacts and recommend specific areas that should be corrected, modified or further studied.

Samsung broke ground on a massive new headquarters for its U.S. Research and Development operations in north San Jose. More than any project to date, the new Samsung campus embraces the city’s vision of a denser, more walkable pattern along North First Street, the city’s tech employment heartland.

The Regional Prosperity Plan is a SPUR-led regional effort to develop an economic prosperity strategy for the Bay Area. After a year of extensive outreach and technical analysis, the team is now engaged in developing recommendations broken out by goals and strategies.

From The Year in Urbanism : Critics across the political spectrum challenged the newly adopted Plan Bay Area, a 30-year regional plan that aligns transportation investments with assumptions about growth. By contesting the fundamental notion of a shared regional responsibility, the opponents of Plan Bay Area are undercutting the role of regional planning as a tool to manage long-term growth.

From The Year in Urbanism : Two Bay Area regional planning agencies adopted Plan Bay Area, which combines a relatively compact land use vision for 2 million more people and 1 million jobs with $290 billion in transportation investments through 2040.

Middle-wage jobs are becoming scarcer as more and more job growth takes place at the high and low ends of the wage spectrum. How can we create opportunity for low-wage workers to move up? Past efforts to address this issue have sometimes emphasized the differences between workers in different wage groups. But this often masks the specific information needed to solve the challenge.